GNU RCS 5.8.1 available

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

release notes:

  This is a bugfix and doc-upgrade release, and commences the
  MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH versioning.  Please see AUTHORS and THANKS.

  At least one more patch release is indicated, for the tarball
  includes the superfluous README-alpha that can be safely ignored
  (discovered while composing this announcement, so it goes) but
  nonetheless should be considered a process bug.

  Another anomoly (to conventions) is that this patch release
  actually removes something: the rcsintro(1) manpage.  This was
  an elision of two actions: moving the manpage out of section 1
  (as there is no such 'rcsintro' command), and getting rid of
  manpages altogether.  Clumsiness from laziness maybe, or rather
  haphazard stumbling as the legs tire.  If you are a fan of RCS
  and would like to write and contribute introductory material to
  the (texinfo) manual, please feel free to do so.

  Lastly, a note about the repo (see "source code", below) for the
  practitioners of software freedom.  To make this release, many
  commits from 'master' were cherry-picked to a still-to-be-pushed
  branch.  I expect to push it in the next week or so, after some
  process details relating to the change in versioning scheme are
  figured out (and recorded in HACKING).

README excerpt:

  GNU RCS (Revision Control System) manages multiple revisions of files.
  RCS can store, retrieve, log, identify, and merge revisions.
  It is useful for files that are revised frequently, e.g.,
  programs, documentation, graphics, and papers.

NEWS excerpt:

  - 5.8.1 | 2012-06-05

    - Bugs fixed

      - Debug output removed

        Due to an oversight, release 5.8 rlog included code to write
        debugging output to stderr for invocations using the ‘-d’ option
        and a date range (e.g., ‘rlog -d 2010<2012’).

      - Criteria for avoiding read-only checks refined

        For "make check", some test cases are inhibited if the user
        running the test is not effectively blocked from writing a
        purportedly read-only file, such as when "make check" is run by
        the super user, or for certain (weird) NFS situations.

        Previously, to determine this condition, we considered only the
        operating system type, a very crude (and incomplete) proxy.
        Now, we explicitly check with a shell sequence comprising the
        umask(1) and test(1) commands, plus output-redirection.

      - Regression in ‘-zLT’ handling

        On a 64-bit x86 system, RCS 5.8 introduced a regression whereby:

         rlog -zLT -d>2011-05-04

        would select the correct entry but display its date always with
        default (01) month and day, i.e., YYYY-01-01.  This is now fixed
        (see also tests/t320).

      - Regression in ‘ci -d -T’ handling

        RCS 5.8 introduced a regression whereby:

          ci -l -d -T FILE

        would set the mtime of RCS/FILE,v (the comma-v file) to the
        epoch.  This is now fixed (see also tests/t810).

    - Use ‘diff --label’ instead of ‘diff -L’

        Previously, RCS used GNU diff's ‘-L’ option.  According to Paul
        Eggert (a GNU diffutils maintainer):

          That option has been undocumented since diffutils 2.8
          (released in March 2002) and the option is intended to
          be replaced sometime soon with a different meaning.

        Now, RCS uses ‘diff --label’, thus immune to the planned change.

    - Miscellaneous changes
      - Make help extraction noisy (on failure)
      - Silence some compiler warnings
      - Increase coverage of "make check"

    - Documentation improvements

      - Manpage rcsintro(1) dropped

        This manpage is redundant, and (arguably) should not have been
        in section 1 in the first place.

      - Use "Invoking COMMAND" instead of "COMMAND" as node names

        This makes it easier for ‘info --usage COMMAND’ to DTRT, and
        makes GNU (info "(standards) Manual Structure Details") happy.

      - explicitly UTF-8

        This is to prepare for a (future) GNU Texinfo release that
        renders @code in a more pretty way when the encoding is UTF-8.
        If you're reading this (from the future) with such a Texinfo at
        hand, feel free to regenerate the docs in doc/ prior to install.

      - CVS is not GNU

        Previously, we incorrectly said "GNU CVS", succumbing to a
        common misunderstanding.  Now we know better.

    - TAGS file no longer distributed

        To create, configure normally and do "make TAGS".

    - New configure script option ‘--enable-coverage’

        Specifying ‘--enable-coverage’ causes ‘_Exit’ to be an alias for
        ‘exit’ and CFLAGS to append ‘--coverage’ if the compiler is GCC.
        This is needed because the coverage machinery writes the .gcda
        files only on ‘exit’.

        This option is for maintainers; most people can ignore it.

    - Portability improvements
      - Use more gnulib modules
      - Use portable Makefile subst-ref variable syntax
      - Use portable shell command-output interpolation syntax
    - Maintenance tools upgraded
      - GNU Automake 1.12
      - GNU Autoconf 2.69
      - gnulib-tool (GNU gnulib 2012-06-03 16:29:00) 0.0.7432-f6c24-modified

tarball and detached signature:

  http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/rcs/rcs-5.8.1.tar.gz
  http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/rcs/rcs-5.8.1.tar.gz.sig

source code:

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/rcs.git

homepage:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/